Digg-numbers

TechCrunch posts today on failed efforts by Digg to sell the company for at least $150M. Another day, another hundred million dollars. What caught my eye was the reference to one of the reasons why:

One point of controversy was around Diggâ€™s claim of 20 million unique monthly visitors and steep monthly growth, whereas the Comscoreâ€™s most recent September report shows only 1.3 million monthly unique visitors and flat growth since April (see chart below). Comscore is notoriously flaky, and these numbers are for U.S. households only. Comscore is almost certainly significantly under-reporting Digg traffic.

Interestingly, this echoes the smackdown between Rocketboom and Zefrank earlier this week over the accuracy of Rocketboom’s reported traffic numbers. I have no idea whether Rocketboom’s reporting is accurate or not, but it’s clear that the difficulty in calculating traffic is causing some real teeth-grinding, and perhaps a little axe-grinding as well.

One last point – this is about the Nth time that Mike Arrington has had THE scoop on tech M&A news; he’s now consistently out-scooping the MSM when it comes to good old-fashioned business reporting, at least on the topic of Web 2.0.

[…] How Digg Might Fit Exactly into Myspace — Crazy but Brilliant? October 25th, 2006 at 9:37 am by Tony Mike Arrington recently broke the rumours on TechCrunch on how News “I’m desperate to break into New Media” Corp is eyeing Digg hungrily. Sure enough, the rumour mill has begun churning yet once again with talks of acquisition in the air. Digg has publicly been “valued” by Businessweek at around 200 million dollars earlier in the year, and was actively scoffed at by some; perhaps in the wake of YouTube’s 1.65B purchase, it may not look so absurd after all. […]